Welcome To Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Of Dreams (9 page)

Rosie slept late the next morning and awoke, not to a chiming alarm clock or to buses wheezily groaning to a stop outside her window or, worst of all, to the clattering of bottles being emptied out from the nightclub next door at 4am. This was bad enough when it woke her; worst of all was when she’d been lying awake for so long wondering about the future that she heard the staff carting them out.

But here, the only sound was a faint rustling, and birdsong, a happy twittering somewhere nearby. The room, with its open curtains, was bathed in soft golden light and she sat up to take in her surroundings for the first time. Wiping the sleep from her eyes, she breathed a sigh.

The room was plain and bare, but Rosie rather liked it like that. Whoever had converted it had done a beautiful job. It had a plain whitewashed wooden floor covered in thick patterned rugs, with two walls a pale blue and the other two papered in a tiny blue flower print. Her large, antique sleigh bed had white wooden cabinets on either side, both with candlesticks and white candles. A small wooden door led to a compact white ensuite bathroom, another to a built-in wardrobe, and there was a slightly incongruous baggy pink armchair in the corner of the room.

A dormer window looked over the front of the house. Jumping up and peering through it, Rosie saw it pointed towards a field full of sheep, the green gorse of the hills and, beyond, miles and miles of blue-washed sky. On the other side of the room, above the trapdoor, a single tiny window high in the wall looked over into Lilian’s back garden. It was exquisite, bordered by a picket fence, and neatly laid out, hollyhocks and wisteria predominating. It wasn’t large but it was extremely neat, with gravel paths meandering here and there between high-tied rose bushes and sharply clipped hedges. One corner was laid out with vegetables (Rosie wondered about this; Lilian didn’t seem to be eating any of them); one to herbs and, at the very end, where a small wooden gate led out on to yet another field, there were two huge apple trees growing intertwined to form a bower. Tiptoeing to lean out, Rosie thought she could hear the dreamy buzzing of summer bees.

Rosie had never been anywhere like this before. A garden like this, spilling into open land … well, of course, it just didn’t happen in the city, or certainly not in the parts of it she knew well. She took a deep breath, inhaled the scent of the garden, the dark green gorse smell of the hills, the underlying flavour of the earth. She felt as if something was missing; there was no thrum of traffic and motion and trains rumbling beneath the earth or planes cutting through the sky. Just this peace. Shaking her head, she washed and dressed, feeling, for the first time, a tiny hint of excited curiosity about what the day might bring.

Downstairs there was no sign of her great-aunt. Rosie peeped into the bedroom, but the old lady was fine, just fast
asleep. Sleep and good food; what Lilian needed more than anything, Rosie surmised. She could work on the second one.

She crept back upstairs and called her mother.

‘Angie?’

‘Aw yih?’

‘Mum! Stop that, you’re not Australian.’

‘Darling, I have a natural facility for accents. I just pick them up. Are you there?’

‘Of course I’m here. What did you think, I was going to say I was coming then fly to the US?’

‘No need to be so touchy! Were you always so touchy?’

Rosie took a deep breath and managed to avoid saying anything sarcastic about being plucked out of your life and sent to the back of beyond to babysit a grumpy geriatric because everyone else was too busy having barbecues by the swimming pool and drinking beer from a little bottle and saying yih.

‘Never mind,’ she said.

‘Did Gerard drive you up and settle you in?’ said Angie, in a conciliatory tone which unfortunately failed in its goal.

‘No,’ said Rosie. ‘I got the bus. I didn’t mind,’ she lied.

Angie didn’t say anything for a moment.

‘Well, OK!’ she added finally. ‘Why don’t you go out and explore?’

Rosie had been considering staying in bed till Lilian got up, hiding with her book and enjoying a rare lie-in on her own that wasn’t punctuated by the sound of Gerard playing Grand Theft Auto at ear-shattering volume, but her mum was insistent.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Lipton’s nice, I used to spend a lot of time there as a child. Get your bearings. Introduce yourself.’

Rosie rolled her eyes. ‘I’m not “introducing myself”.’

‘It’s a village, they’ll expect it. They’ll find out who you are anyway, everyone gossips non-stop.’

‘Well, they’ll have nothing to gossip about with me.’

But she decided to follow her mother’s instructions anyway; there wasn’t a sound from downstairs. She wondered, thinking about the tidily made and unused-looking bed, exactly how much sleep Lilian had been getting lately, and figured she’d better leave her to it. Plus, she was absolutely starving and didn’t want to stomp around the tiny doll’s-house kitchen.

So she tidied up the sitting room, put a load of laundry into the prehistoric twin tub – how on earth had Lilian managed to look so dapper? It must have been agony for her – changed into a floral frock, a denim jacket and the patterned wellies she’d bought four years ago in an attempt to be hip and go to Glastonbury (which had ended very badly indeed); left a note for Lilian and the door on the latch and stepped out into the morning.

1942

When she first saw them, she couldn’t quite believe it. Four weeks’ worth of ration cards, pale pink cardboard, neatly lined up in a row
.

‘What’s this?’ she said coolly, convinced he was buying an enormous box of chocolates for another girl
.

Henry looked pink. ‘A large bag of caramels please.’

Blinking nervously, Lilian climbed the little stepladder, conscious of his eyes on her. It was a ravishingly beautiful day outside, and the shop was empty so early
.

She filled the bag with the sweet, shining, fudgy caramels. No one took her responsibilities more seriously than Lilian. Her father had made it clear that in times of hardship, they absolutely couldn’t be seen to be taking more than their fair share. He had been so grave when he had said it, asking for her promise on the issue, that Lilian hadn’t had a sweet since. Surrounded by them all day, most of the time she didn’t miss it too much. She didn’t usually eat caramel, had always liked to get more for her money, something with a bit of crunch in it
.

The pink-striped bag was bulging by the time Henry put down his sixpence
.

‘There you are,’ she said. Henry didn’t pick up the bag
.

‘They’re for you,’ he said
.

Lilian stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Your friend told me they were your favourites.’

Ida Delia, thought Lilian. Ida Delia would even tell a fib about something as stupid as that
.

‘Are they all for me?’

‘They are,’ said Henry, blushing. ‘Unless you’d like to share one.’

Lilian looked at him, half shocked, half giggling, as her father dinged into the shop
.

‘Come on, Lils,’ he said. ‘Get a shuffle on.’ He looked up. ‘Hello, Carr.’ He sniffed quickly, then grabbed the bag. ‘These yours, are they?’

By this time Henry was puce and looked at her in horror. Lilian’s father pressed the sweets into his hands
.

‘Well, come on, young man, we haven’t got all day. There’s a war on, you know. You
do
know?’ he said, with the serious air of a man with three sons fighting and who was looking at a perfectly healthy young man with the time to wander around eating sweets
.

Lilian looked at Henry, waiting for him to announce that he’d bought the sweets for her. But poor Henry was in a panic. Such an enormous gesture; he might as well ask for her hand. This wasn’t what he’d expected at all
.

‘Uhm, well,’ he began. ‘I’d like to …’

Mr Hopkins had already started examining the ledger. Henry glanced at Lilian, who couldn’t help him, but just looked at him like a big-eyed panic-stricken mouse. He couldn’t read it at all. Was she terrified he was going to say something in front of her father? Had he misjudged the situation entirely? She hadn’t even looked happy that it was caramels; were they really her favourites? He felt a horrid dull flush deepen over his face
.

‘I’ll come back for these later,’ he said, then turned round and left. Neither of the Hopkinses said goodbye. Lilian’s fingernails were tightly dug into the palm of her hand
.

‘What an odd fellow,’ said her father eventually, then wondered why his daughter was pushing past him into the house. He’d never understood her mother either
.

First off, Rosie stopped at the little shop next door. The front of it was ancient, and the mullioned windows, which were of thick glass, could do with a proper scrubbing out. The wood frontage was painted a kind of fading burgundy but although
the building was pretty, the paint was flaking, and the swinging striped sign outside,
Hopkins’ Sweets and Confectionery
, was gilded but tired-looking. Inside Rosie could just about make out jars of this and that, in a slightly higgledy-piggledy order, and lots of jelly snakes sitting out in a huge dusty box. It didn’t, she thought, look terribly appealing. In fact, to her horror, she realised that it wasn’t open; that it clearly hadn’t been open for a long, long time. Lilian had been fooling everyone for what looked like years.

Rosie winced. This job of hers was going to be even more of a pain in the arse than she had expected.

She shook off her horrible sense of foreboding and decided to follow the flow and see where she ended up.

The cottage and shop sat at the western end of the main street of Lipton, a collection of thatched cottages, a doctor’s surgery, lawyer’s office, dentist, several feed stores, and a clothing store which featured some extraordinary mother-of-the-bride outfits that Rosie, belying her hunger, spent several moments staring at. What type of person could be in need of a huge jade, silver and violet-striped formal jacket with shoulder pads and large paisley flowers embroidered down the front for two hundred and seventy-nine pounds? The clothing shop next door sold jodhpurs, quilted jackets and waterproof trousers. Rosie wondered where the nearest shopping centre was, then figured out it was probably at the other end of that two-hour bus trip.

She mentally ran through her wardrobe. Since she and Gerard had moved in together, she had just got so comfy. Maybe that was why Lilian still dressed so formally; because she had never found anyone she could relax with. A perfect
night for Rosie these days was a takeaway, a bottle of wine and a movie, her head tucked under Gerard’s arm, lying on the sofa they’d bought in Ikea. OK, so Gerard teased her about wearing her old pyjama pants and slippers around the house and asked what had happened to the hot young thing he’d met at the hospital, but this was what contentment looked like. She thought about Lilian’s smart appearance, though, and wondered for an instant if her own approach might just be complacency.